Updated August 2016: We have removed some tools that no longer exist and included some other free tools worth trying out – all aimed at helping monitor your social accounts effectively.

The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, your competitors, and the market in general. Once you have the data you can undertake analysis, and finally, reach social business intelligence; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy.

If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy. When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best.

However, bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools, such as Brandwatch, which brought social media monitoring to a new level, offering a much higher variety of services, functionality, and in-depth analysis. It all depends on your needs.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best free monitoring tools:

Hootsuite is one of the best free social media listening tools available and covers multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+. It is well known for its social media management functions.

The weekly reports and the excellent team management facility (delegating tasks, sending private messages) can be very useful when there’s more than one person handling the social media accounts.

Klout is probably one of the most controversial social media monitoring tools. There are those who hate it and claim that its scoring system is completely inaccurate and that trying to interact with them is an impossible mission (a curious thing as they provide interaction-measurement services).

On the other hand, some people find it useful, as it measures influence through engagement on Twitter. It is a good means of keeping an eye on what people think about your brand, and to see what influences them the most.

Using the Klout score you can adjust your posts according to your target audience’s interests and increase your engagement rate.

Quite popular among social media enthusiasts, Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites. It is probably one of the best free listening tools on the market, as it analyses data in more depth and measures influence with 4 categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach. It also displays top keywords, hashtags, and sites.

Twazzup is great for social media beginners looking for a Twitter monitoring tool. You just enter the name you want to track and you instantly get real-time updates, meaning the most active top influencers, most retweeted photos and links, and most importantly, the top 10 keywords related to your search.

If aiming to get an overall view of a brand, Addictomatic can be very useful and as straightforward as Twazzup. The only difference is that Addictomatic focuses on a variety of platforms, including Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Bing News, Delicious, Google, Ask.com, etc. It’s really useful for keeping an eye on recent industry developments and brand reputation.

HowSociable is a handy tool for measuring your and your competitors’ social media presence.

A free account allows you to track 12 social sites, including Tumblr and WordPress. However, if you’re interested in 24 more, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. a pro account is required.

HowSociable’s approach to social monitoring is a bit different as it breaks down scores for different social media platforms, allowing you to see which social media platforms work best for you and which ones need further development.

This tool offers blog, Twitter and Facebook monitoring in 20 languages, as well as results graphs that you can play with. It allows you to choose the period of time you are interested in monitoring.

It can be used for keeping an eye on blog activity mentioning your brand, as they have around 200 million blogs in their database and they also provide the possibility of finding the latest trend terms related to your search.

TweetDeck covers the basic needs of any Twitter user, so is a good option for beginners. It’s a great tool for scheduling tweets and monitoring your interactions and messages, as well as tracking hashtags and managing multiple accounts. There is a web app, chrome ap, or mac app. The Windows app ceased functioning in April 2016.

Mention monitors million of sources in 42 languages, helping you stay on top of all your brand mentions on social networks, news sites, forums, blogs or any web page.

The app lets you keep track of your team’s actions, share alerts and assign tasks. Generating reports and exporting mentions can help you get a snapshot of your mentions by source or language over a selected period of time. They offer a 14-day free trial.

Twitonomy offers a range of metrics for free, with premium features enabled for $19/month. Simply sign in with your Twitter account for robust monitoring and metrics about your account. You can add your competitor’s Twitter handles to gain insights about their activity too.

Twitonomy shows you details of your Twitter lists, followers and followings, your most popular Tweets, engagement statistics and much more.

You can track conversations on Twitter based on hashtags, users, or lists. The details are displayed in graphs and easily digestible stats.

Simply Measured makes it easy to analyze your paid, owned and earned activity. The main suite is a paid tool, but it can still be used to create free individual reports for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Vine and Google+.

They provide insights such as Facebook content, competitor and fan page analysis, key customer service metrics measurement on Twitter, Instagram engagement, content and trends analysis and many others.

With Google Alerts you can monitor the web for interesting new content, mentions of your brand or even yourself, your competitors, industry leaders and so on. As they’re extremely easy to set up, this is social media montioring for beginners.

By creating a Google Alert, you will receive email notifications every time Google finds new results on a topic that interests you across blogs, forums and news sites.

It should be clear if you’ve got this far that the social listening tool space is a crowded one.

We’ve developed our own social media monitoring technology with larger, more sophisticated organisations in mind, but we hope this list for getting started is a useful foundation.

If you are interested in seeing what more advanced tools like Brandwatch can offer, the please do get in touch by booking a demo.

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Discover the world’s leading social media monitoring platform for yourself.

Thanks for the great story Ruxandra ! May I also recommend https://en.mention.net/ I have recently switched over to there pro-version account and i have been very happy with there service. They offer a free trial and they have a app for our smartphone so you can monitor on the go!

I like your post on Social Media Tools, Undoubtedly you have send great message to people who are very keen learner on Social Media. I’m also using one of the social media tools for monitoring and tracking is Easesocial. This influence me very much.

Hi Ruxandra,
thanks for the overview. We also just create an overview of all current available monitoring tools. Now I can add a few providers on http://www.monitoring-monitor.com again. :-)
Cheers

Michél

Angela Davies

Just a thought but maybe you should look at buzzbundle from link assistant – http://www.buzzbundle.co.uk there is a free and paid version of it and when I checked it was the only tool I could find that monitored youtube and Google + , and it’s installed on your PC / mac rather than being pay per month cloud based etc

John O’Riordain

Frankly speaking, I was surprised not to find BuzzBundle which I’ve
been using for quite a while now. I’d recommend including it in the list
as well.

oLger J. Simpson

I would recommend CrowdRatio, is still in beta but the fact that they’re looking to incorporate business intelligence charts and advanced analytics to the reports says a lot of the kind of tool they’re building. http://crowdratio.com/

tracysestili

But the issue is that no one wants to download something on their computer these days. They’d much rather run it in the cloud or from the website.

tracysestili

I need a tool that monitors Facebook activity, specifically a post or image URL. But can’t seem to find one. Anyone?

Hootsuite and Klout for sure! Missing a couple that I would highly recommend!

-SproutSocial – analyzing and insight gathering. sproutsocial.com.

-SocialRest – Tracks conversions made from social influencers engagements with your brand. socialrest.me.

Other than that, great list!

daniel

yeah these are great tools but i must say that miss leading your readers by saying free when it is not is unproffesional and the same as spamming in my book….lie to people for traffic andad payments…you should be ashamed

Hi Tracy. Have you looked into our Facebook channels? It allows our users to monitor their Facebook activity and much more http://bit.ly/1m7ZNZ3

Ruxandra

Hi Daniel!

Thank you for your comment. The tools I’ve recommended are indeed free, but there are always cases when free platforms also offer the option to pay for more features or in-depth insights, it all depends on your needs!

Great information, I really like all your post. I will keep visiting this blog very often. It’s good to visit your website. And also please Read link bvba Woodstone which provide information server monitoring software & Network monitoring tools

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Hootsuite. Free accounts are still available: http://bit.ly/1ibTTEK Perhaps you can try contacting support to find out more? Or drop them a line on one of their social accounts?

Hi Young, there are lots of great social intelligence platforms but it all depends on what you’re looking for. We’d be happy to show you how you can research by vertical activity with our platform if you like: http://bit.ly/1mjESg6

Hi Ruxandra, This is Mrigank from the socialclout team. SocialClout is complete suite of tools that help Businesses to manage their social media marketing and monitoring initiatives. It Includes Monitoring, Listening, Engagement workflow, Social Media Analytics and Social Media lead generation. Would request you to visit http://www.socialclout.com and try out our 30 day free trial. This tool would be a great asset to the marketing teams of small businesses.

programmer

Hi,please check http://www.brandgauge.com it is one of the best and free social monitoring tools,you can get daily email reports of social media stats,

Hi Ruxandra, These are great set of tools. This is Mrigank from the socialclout team. SocialClout is a complete suite of tools that help Businesses to manage their social media marketing and monitoring initiatives. It Includes Monitoring, Listening, Engagement workflow, Social Media Analytics and Social Media lead generation and competitve analysis.I Would request you to visit http://www.socialclout.com to evaluate by trying out our 30 day free trial. Would appreciate your feedback.This tool would be a great asset to the marketing teams of small businesses because it is rich in feature and competitive in pricing.

John

I tried Knotlink and its very user friendly. Its free too! Try it out guys!

This is quite useful post and I really like this article. One thing, I’m just curios about which social monitor tools can be send the notifications when the sites getting new comment/feedback. Could you recommend it?

Jayant Singh

Great information….

I also suggest to check out – ZuPush.com, a Social Media Management Service on Monthly Subscription.They will manage your entire social media, end-to-end, everything.

Sudeep Kumar

The list is is very helpful for a socail media analytics…
Wanna just add an information about the new analytical tool i.e. SocialClout, which according to me consist of a complete suite of tools that help Businesses to manage
their social media marketing and monitoring initiatives. It Includes
Monitoring, Listening, Engagement workflow, Social Media Analytics, Social
Media lead generation and competitive analysis.
I would ask you to visit http://www.socialclout.com and evaluate by trying out our 30 day free trial. Would appreciate your
feedback. This tool would be a great asset to the marketing teams of small
businesses because it is rich in feature and competitive in pricing.

This is a great list and I found IceRocket which I never tried before! Thanks! If you’re looking for great PR tools check out this list – might find something new http://bit.ly/1ylU2ZD

Chandu Romeo

Absolutely amazing tools

momo ni

i do count alot to google plus i like it so much. and thank you for the Great list of SEO tools !! I will always checking my Google, facbook and twitter insights. its good to know about other tools too !! العاب تلوين

Hi Michél, thanks for your feedback. I love how your site maps monitoring tools all over the world. Does it only focus on social media monitoring tools, or also on tools that focus on social media management / engagement? And does it consider both paid and free tools? I’d be happy to add a few monitoring tools to the list. Thanks for the tip!

It’s best to analyze the market for a variety of tools to make sure you find the right one that fits your requirements. If you’re a big fan of Google plus, these tools might be of interest: http://brnw.ch/1y0RwXk Google+ expert, Adam Connell, has listed some great tools can help you measure and improve your Google+ page performance.

Hi BlogsRelease, thanks for sharing your feedback & your article! What a great list of PR tools you have there. We only focused on free social media monitoring tools in this post, but some of them are useful from a PR perspective as well. Would be great to hear which PR & social media monitoring tools help you in your job! :)

Thanks so much for your feedback Timooc! We’ve listed Klout as one of the top free tools in this post. I also love how Buffer allows me to share great content on my social channels from anywhere on the web, Sproutsocial is a great tool as well, but they don’t seem to offer a free plan, which is why we didn’t review them here. Thanks for sharing your most preferred tools with us!

Hi Esther, glad you find it helpful! There are a few tools that allow you to do that. Have you checked Google Alerts of Brandwatch’s alerts feature yet (http://bit.ly/1f6WoB5)? Let me know if you need some more tips.

One question, I want to track competitor’ like source on facebook. They are getting around 60 likes/minute and I don’t think this is genuine. If anyone knows a tool to check whether like are genuine or not then please give me.

Rachel Jean-Pierre

Great article!
Just want to inform you Addictomatic (#6) is no longer in service!

Hello, great list! I’ll share it with me audience, because I think it’s very useful :)

I wanna just add an information about the new analytical tool, not free, but cheaper than other one (pricing starts with less than $50), called Brand24. It has excellent social media monitoring and analytic capabilities. Would love to show you Brand24 sometime. http://www.brand24.net

what about us?) onlypult.com – the best tool for scheduling Instagram posts! Onlypult is a service for posting scheduled Instagram updates. You can upload images from your computer, apply filters from the web, manage one or multiple Instagram accounts, give an SMM manager posting rights without giving them access to your brand’s Instagram account

Aveek

any good tools to list my twitter followers by country?

ProcessMyMedia

With ApiFlow (http://www.apiflow.net), you can easily develop workflow-based applications with no coding that use Social Media Apis (twitter, google, facebook…) and meet the exact needs of your business.

Hi Onlypult! Looks like you’re offering Instagram scheduling and editing capabilities based on 3 different price plans. In this article we only focused on free social media monitoring tools which is why we haven’t checked it out. Thanks for sharing though.

Would you please advise me which of these platforms is/are regarded as most compatible with the PIER System (Public Information Emergency Response)?

Tommy Wales

If you want to monitor how the world’s journalists are tweeting about your brand or products, Anewstip (www.anewstip.com) is a great tool. It allows you to search through realtime and historical tweets since 2006 by close to 1 million journalists, including those from CNN, New York Times, BBC, etc. It’s Alerts feature allows you to monitor those journalists’ Twitter timelines on an hourly basis.

Hi Tom, feel free to request demos or reach out to these tools directly, there are plenty of options. If you’re looking for best crisis management tools, I’d recommend giving Brandwatch a try, our clients often use the platform for PR tracking purposes, and there several features specifically designed for crisis management, such as custom real-time alerts or our recently launched feature, Signals. You can read more here: https://www.brandwatch.com/2015/03/launching-signals/ :-)

Vincent Perro

Good thoughts, but i think you should’ve added some more tools for Instagram. For example a web app for mass unfollowing – fast-unfollow.com, it can do up to 5000 unsubscriptions per day. Latergram.me is the best for scheduling posts so your media activity don’t stop even if you’re chilling by the ocean taking new photos. By the way statigr.am is now iconosquare.com, any names with insta- or – gram are now banned by instagram itself.

Ruxandra

Great observation, Vincent and thanks a lot for your suggestions – I’ll be looking into Instagram tools in the near future, as it will be our core focus in an upcoming post.. happy to share that with you when it goes live.

George West

Thank you so much!

George West

Hi!
I searched a long time for the posting of deferred service Instagram, but found free service. I tried a lot and can recommend to schedule
posts on instagram https://push.photo/ use 4 months and all is well.

Romon Fab

Hi!
already use instagram for marketing my business (local shop), and I searched a long time for the posting of deferred service Instagram, but found free service.I want to recommend way to schedule posts on instagram https://push.photo/ use 4 months and all is well.

Maciej Klowan

I think that you should add here ticksters.com they are really cool

Rajoo Alu

Yes,George this one is good, I found it here on blogstools.com

Echospace Agency

Just wanted to give some credit to you on this post. We use a few of these in the office but just wanted to give the credit that it deserves. We may do a similar blog but target it at just platforms for example. The best for Twitter, the best for Facebook, the best for Instagram etc we’ll let you know. Thanks again and well done for the post

No doubt this is an excellent list but I suggest SocialPilot because it’s a user-friendly as well as the great alternative to Buffer and Hootsuite. The best features of SocialPilot is scheduling post that allows to create schedules for posting on social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Branding: Personalized Facebook branding is possible
RSS feeds: I can share post with 20 RSS feeds.
Account group: Now I can easily create unlimited social media accounts for my post.
Free plan: I can manage total 100 posts in a queue

Among such splendid instruments like Google alerts or Hootsuite, i would recomend https://kuku.io – service for delayed posting with the simpliest interface in the world and ability to customize content for each social net (facebook, twitter, Linkedin + soon will be released Pinterest, Reddit and Google+).

I made an app to analyse your personal Facebook data. I wanted to know more about a photo album I had posted but no tools allowed me to do that, so I made one: https://www.facebook.com/games/analytics-scholatec/
No graphs, just lots of pretty pictures. Also it is completely free and we store none of your data.

http://www.Trackalytics.com Trackalytics also provides free social media and website monitoring tools. You don’t even need to register, simply search for your social media account or website and we will begin tracking it daily.

GsUpHoesDown2

Hootsuite, for example, is free. If you want more features other than the basics then you have to pay. That is normal.

Digisha

Nice list of tools Indeed! except Hootsuite all tools are new for me. Also, I would like to recommend SocialPilot.co as it allows to schedule your post across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest. It is user-friendly and affordable as well.

I do not know how the other instruments, but true statistics and analytics is the foundation for building a plan for promoting the social pages. Especially when you can analyze the competition, is not this cool? And I’m doing it in https://feedspy.net/?partner_id=1016, as it allows the tool to get all the statistics and analytics competitors, to compare the page and watch all the graphs.

Fling Poo On You

My business has so many variables that cookie cutter solutions don’t really work for me so I wind up writing solutions myself (if it’s SOMEWHAT reasonable and easy). I don’t remember how I found this guy’s website, but most everything discussed on this page- he’s written open source versions of. I’m now doing business with him and saving myself headaches.
He’s does GREAT work- http://www.alreadycoded.com/

franco

Thanks Prince. That’s very true. A lot of bloggers I talk to don’t use either so it’s a good point about them not being highlighted too much. They do work very well. weebly games

leto_leto

This article is pure bs written by someone who knows nothing about design, biology, molecular structures, dna etc. Pretty much anything scientific. Whoever studied the importance of the phi number will understand how all nature and the return universe evolves around and is based on the number.

Very impressed with Google alerts, thanks for having that in the list. Are there any other social listening services like that where we can get alerts when particular keyphrases are mentioned in particular regions? Most of the social listening services show global results, which isn’t very useful.

It is actually humorous when Each individual of them has various view about one particular situation, then These are biting one another could you notify of which just one is Riley’s key emotion? Good! That you are ideal. Ally of Riley is Pleasure, which keeps good each minute of Riley’s life as it absolutely was so tricky to become accustomed to new lifetime in San Francisco. Feelings are combating about how to in to highschool, during the cinema or merely tips on how to navigate while in the town. I promise that it’s way too humorous.http://insideoutgames77.com/ Lol grin emoticon As Riley is 11 years aged she likes it but there is really chaos in her mind. In that amusing online games you should aid Riley God her emotions to carry out day-to-day items and be favourable.

tanner

I’m looking for a tool that would allow me to monitor my vendors company from a negative standpoint online. Would you recommend these same tools in that capacity as well? Any specific one (regardless of free or not) that you recommend? I’m looking for a tool that will pull in any negative publicity that could impact my business. I have a ton of boolean search words that can be applied to limit the amount of noise I receive, just looking for the right tool.

A great tool for improving your enterprises and attracting potential clients is Yelp. You will be able to nip it in the bud quickly, and see anything negative being said about your business, when you monitor your social presence. Every business often tries to find ways to stand out to consumers in all the right ways, hoping to become the loyal choice of their client. Every business has its stock of disgruntled customers and internet is the easiest platform for your dissatisfied customers to complain about you. No matter how great a business is at client service, for every 100 satisfied customers, 1 will needs be offended.

Thanks for the tools, another helpful tool would be http://www.socialhub.io to manage social media in teams, agencies with a high page activity. Increasing efficiency through both distribution and ease of use.

Gloria

Great article! A lot of very useful tools.

Like Martyna, I also use Brand24 (now it’s http://brand24.com/ ) and recommend to try. Very friendly tool, easy to use but still efficient. Great solution for big companies but also for little ones, bloggers, etc.
Take a look and maybe you may like to add to the list of recommendations.

Brian Jackson

Great list of information. Many free tools have helped our business to keep a pulse on our social media. There is a new platform out that starts around the $100 a month range for those that like the DIY platforms. Make sure to get the free report first if you have a business or are in social media or reputation management. http://maidendeals.mobi

I agree with Daniel, Ruxandra is nothing more than a salesperson trying to help make sales for these various products – free is free and if you really want any of these social media tools to REALLY do the work for you – you have to pay – just be honest and not mis-leading.
There’s no harm in being honest – everybody has to make a living
and as i said above, free is free – some of these tools are NOT free tools, just not – a few actually are IF you don’t want much benefit.
There is simply no free lunch in this world we live in – would be nice but then again, maybe not – if a product is quality, paying for it can be ok.

Nibha Chaudhuri

Great list Ruxandra! Having used most of these tools (TweetDeck, Google Alerts, Social Mention, Followerwonk), I can attest to their perfomance value. Another tool that’s worth looking into is DrumUp-social media management and content curation. In terms of social media monitoring, I think in terms of content curation, DrumUp’s content discovery option is great since it tells you what kind of articles are trending, and it picks up articles from reputable sources. Check it out here https://drumup.io, and please consider adding it to your list (or future lists) if you find it interesting.

Hey, Ruxandra! Oscilloskope (www.oscilloskope.com) is a new player on the market. Oscilloskope monitors the whole web’s universe, social media (including REAL Facebook monitoring), forums, blogs, Reddit, Youtube and much more. Track and monitor your product, your name as an entrepreneur and see the conversations happening around you or your product. Cheers!

Emma Wilson

Hi,
There is another cross-posting plugin Blog2Social. It is user friendly and has no server side installation to be done. Not only you have a single dashboard which will help you post across platforms but also it requires no cron job done.

My Favourite tool “simply Measured” I just love this tool .Thanks for sharing.

Garey O’Corner

Hey guys! I know one more useful tool to upload photos on instagram from laptop. Check push.photo I use 5 months and all works well

Bar and Nightclub

Latergram is another platform that has a free offering for Insta.

Tyrohn White

So many tools. Every blog I am reading almost have same tools that are described in the list. The only difference is in presentation of article and writing style. The last blog which I read was from templatetoaster their presentation of topic was worth. In this article more emphasis should be laid on content to make it more worthy.

Thanks for the post and sharing the blog. Valuable and excellent post, as share good stuff with good ideas and concepts.
lots of great information and inspiration. I just would like to say thanks for your great efforts.
I appreciate your excellent post.

http://www.sscpappu.com is the website for English and maths tutorials. letter writing, essay writing, and Maths Formula are there in very good matter. And the main thing is that it is free stuff for all

Hootsuite is one of the best free social media listening tools available and covers multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+. It is well known for its social media management functions.

Has anyone heard of a company called Tracx for Social Media monitoring?

Darren Roebuck

Thanks for the helpful tips. You can also utilize the power of social media to maximize the benefits of your good online reputation – check out how your business stand with this free comprehensive report generator – http://bit.ly/aor-report